AudioCodes CEO Shabtai Adlersberg - The AudioCodes journey, Hardware to SaaS to AI

Shabtai Adlersberg, Co-Founder, CEO and President of AudioCodes shares the fascinating journey of AudioCodes over the past 31 years, from its establishment to becoming a leader in the voice industry and more recent journey into SaaS and AI.

• Shabtai's background in engineering and digital signal processing, before co-founding AudioCodes
• AudioCodes evolution from focusing on algorithms to developing chipsets and then progressing to gateways and SBCs
• The impact of partnering with Microsoft on AudioCodes success, from Lync to Microsoft Teams
• Challenges and opportunities during market disruptions caused by technological advancements and the pandemic
• The transition from hardware to SaaS platforms
• The future vision for AudioCodes, leveraging conversational AI to enhance products and solutions

Transcript

Shabtai: I was always, you know, dreaming of building a voice moat, right? You know, a moat, you want to build for yourself a fortress where nobody can get near you, right? Just like, you know, big companies, great companies like, you know, Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint did. You know, they were first, they excelled in building a very strong business.

And then it's. Very difficult to come after them. So we're trying to do the same on the voice side.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to do this one. A great guest here and AudioCodes have been a huge supporter of Empowering.Cloud. So, uh, first off, Shabtai, welcome to the podcast. If you could just introduce yourself, please. 

Shabtai: Thank you, Tom. Glad to be here with you this morning. Uh, well, you know, as many of you know, I'm, uh, I'm a co-founder of the company.

You know, uh, go back 30, uh, one years ago, you know, co-founded it, you know, been an engineer, a development engineer in the voice space, and, and I'm CEO and president since then. Uh, also serve as the chairman for like 20 years with nzi. Push me a bit out. Never mind. So, um, I'm an electrical engineer by education.

Right. And, uh, you know, I've been dealing a lot with, you know, digital signal processing work back like 20, 30 years ago, and then dealt with system architectures. So I really love, you know, uh, you know, that that's why I'm still in the business. You know, I love the work. I'd love to see, you know, great new design and new solution coming out.

Um, what I love most about. the play, industry play, and the study codes is really, you know, uh, the, the strategy play. Because, you know, as a CEO of a company, you really need to chart the company way throughout, you know, changing markets, trends, new competition, new technologies, new application. And as we all know, you know, take any, any successful technology company, if you don't reinvent yourself every so many five, seven years, you're out of the game.

I see my hero as CEO really is to navigate through those, uh, those, uh, times and, and always try to, you know, while we work on, you know, developing marketing and selling the current offering, we always need to look, you know, uh, forward, you know, be a, as they say in French, you know, clairvoyant, right? See, for the far, um, So that's why I love this game.

I love the game because of, you know, that all this, you know, strategy games. I've been around in the industry for like 40 years now. Prior to that, I've served like nine years in the Israeli Army as an Intel So, um, Development Engineer. Um, prior to co founding AudioCodes, I've co founded another public company which has been, which was acquired like a year or two ago called DSP Group.

So DSP Group was developing chipsets based on DSP technology. And, you know, it was, it was fun and wonderful. So long career in what I would say, the voice industry. Um, and then personally, you know, I'm, um, I'm a happy father to four, um, you know, great children, two elderly sons, one which works at AudioCodes and helps me on navigating the new business.

and one that is a psychologist. And then I have two little daughters and, and, um, uh, they've been, uh, wonderful in bringing joy and light into my life. So pretty, uh, happy family around me. And I should also mention that, you know, just became grandfather like four weeks ago. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing. Congratulations. So that's, that's like, so CEO, four kids, that's, that's a lot going on.

Shabtai: That's a lot, and it's fun, you know, you want to be. in the action with, you know, the family around you, the business that makes your life, you know, interesting. That's who I am. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So like 30 years, AudioCodes is 31 now, amazing, from, you know, telephony, hardware, very early in, in UC and the Microsoft partnership and seeing the potential in that, now SaaS conversational AI, kind of, you mentioned some of the innovation take us through that journey.

Cause it's quite. Impressive to do these kind of pivots and additions that our industry changed so much over those 30 years, 

Shabtai: right? It's all about passion. So it's all about passion and, you know, dealing with what you love to do and, you know, sitting on top of it always say describe before, you know, looking around me to identify, you know, what's going on and trying to, you know, see ahead.

So, um, yeah, we, we are a company that, as you mentioned, we went up the food chain, you know, we started as two algorithm, um, guys, right? I mean, my, my co founder, Leon, was exceptionally in voice compression technology. I was a good engineer, but then we decided, okay, you, you Leon takes R& D and technology, I'll take the rest of the company to, to take care of.

So we went up the food chain from algorithms to chips. Chips was, well, algorithms was 92, 94. Um, chips was 95 to 2000. We then, we tried to sell chips to the leading, uh, uh, DSP board company at that time. Names like. For our elderly people here on the call, names like Dialogic, Natural Microsystems, Brook trout.

They didn't want to buy our chips. All they wanted to do is to license the technology. And we said, well, we won't make much business that way. So we want to build our own, you know, cards and boards. And, you know, we were lucky to become in two years, you know, leader in the industry. So that was 97, 2000. Then, you know, that was the era where, you know, um, gateway were built out of, you know, cards that were plugged into a PC.

So, name like VocalTech, you know, VocalTech is, uh, the originator, etc. Then, it was obvious that in order to, um, optimize the product, you need to go to a, you know, carefully, design and build, you know, a compact gateway. So, um, well, we're lucky that happened, you know, um, side by side with the internet bubble crisis.

So, we had enough time to build our own gateways, and soon we became a leader in the gateway market. I think, you know, put aside Cisco, which has a huge captive market itself, we became number one in the gateways. So, that's between 2002 and until today. Microsoft actually. And then, um, we did some acquisitions, some that worked, some that didn't.

Um, we were acquainted to the SBC world in 2006. There was a little startup in Dallas, Texas. So, uh, we thought we would, um, um, right with it. We were wrong, you know, because I'll tell you what's the reason. It's a good lesson for anybody that listen. When there's a new market, Microsoft Developing. Always go with the least complex product.

Always go from the low level and work your way upward. And the startup, and this was a pricey lesson, right? The startup we built was, you know, building a a big, huge, you know, SBC monster, which obviously nobody had any use for that when the market opens. So, um, that didn't, that was not successful, but then we, we decided internally that we would go and building our own technology, which started back in 2008 or 9.

And since then we became a leader. I mean, if you look to their own market studies, you'll see that in the enterprise world, because it's been. We do not target so much the service providers. So, um, we became number one. I mean, we're holding a market share of like 23 percent in enterprise SBC. Oracle is like 20 percent and all the rest are, um, you know, below us.

So that those were, you know, that was the SBC, but then we came to the conclusion that we really, and that it's actually tied up to Microsoft. We made a strategic decision back in 2000. We didn't know it was that strategic. Right.

Tom Arbuthnot: I was just gonna ask these, how much vision you had as to Microsoft change.

They always come to disrupt the market and they always say they're gonna disrupt the market. 

Shabtai: You know, I have a funny story for you. Okay. So I'll take you backwards. Okay. In my previous company in 92, so we were voice guys. We were listening, listening to ITU and standards. And then, um, um, leading companies were names like Lucent and Alcatel and Nokia and Ericsson.

And I was a fan of, uh, you know, the Nokia phone and France, right? And then we got, we have been approached by Intel. Intel was then working hand in hand with Microsoft. trying to start some work into the computer world with voice. And people came to me and told me, hey, listen, there's, um, you know, Intel wants to do it, and I said, come on, guys, are you crazy?

You know, you've got those, you know, huge, giant companies like, you know, Lucent, and Nutel, and Alcatel, and all this. You think that Intel will be able to, well, I was wrong. And by the way, Microsoft were also part of that wrong, uh, so I'm not the. the greatest strategist, if you will. So, you know, 15 years later, I knew better than to not pay attention to Microsoft.

So when Microsoft came out with OCS, Open Communication System, and at that time, you know, Cisco and Avaya were, you know, the leaders in that world. I said, well, you know what? You know, they are coming with an application. they'll be faster and, and they'll be, and, and, and they have, you know, the pockets, you know, the other company, Avaya already then was not at its best times.

So we took a decision to stick with Microsoft Lync back in 2010. And that is making our story until today, and I guess for the foreseeable future. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that was my first introduction to audio codes. I was on the Cisco side of the fence, a Cisco partner. We were one of the 10 that launched Call Manager.

That was my world. And then I kept seeing Microsoft moving. I was doing Exchange Unified Messaging. Then I was doing OTS integration to Call Manager. And that's where my first exposure to AudioCodes SBCs was. I jumped over to the Microsoft side of the fence at that point. Microsoft 

Shabtai: Yeah. So, yeah, and quite frankly, I mean, we've been, we've been putting most of our weight behind that effort, right?

And, um, and we were lucky. I mean, well, I need to, you know, give huge, huge thanks to our people because, you know, I can be the greatest dreamer in the world, but if I don't have a good, you know, strong R& D base that helps me, you know, deliver that, And they came out with, you know, wonderful solution up until today.

So we have, um, uh, we became fairly fast. I mean, we had a, um, a tough competition at that time, there was a company called Sonos Networks, which afterwards became Ribbon Communications. And they gave us a fight. They gave us a fight, but it's like back in 2015 was when they had a little crisis. They decided to back off enterprise and go to service provider, and we took advantage of that situation and moved forward.

But the more important step was, as I mentioned before, going up the food chain was that we said, well, you know, Enough is enough. We're selling, you know, best of breed products, okay? Yeah, we could be the best gateway and the best SBC, but we do not control the solution. And so we then decided to come up with, you know, the concept of one voice.

and one voice said to Microsoft at that time, Skype for Business, you know, customers, it told them, hey guys, you know, we bring you the majority of the components, so you don't need to run between different suppliers, you know, take the gateway from that one, SBC from that one, a phone from that one, management from another company, recording, so we said we'll do it all.

And apparently that was the beginning of the most important, you know, step we took. So, uh, we, we started to win more. And by the way, we just heard about, you know, two years after we made that move, you know, throughout the graveyard, we heard that, you know, VP of Marketing of Sonos said, well, that was the move that killed us and we were not paying attention to it.

Right. So we came up with a great solution. Um, and we followed through Microsoft Evolution. So it was, you know, Skype for Business. Then, you know, together with Microsoft, we invested in, you know, Skype for Business Online, which was not the greatest product on earth. They backed off, you know, and then the competition, there was, you know, Two steps in the industry, you know, Slack gave Microsoft a run, so Microsoft need to come, they had to come out with Teams.

which initially was a disaster to us. I said, why go for a new solution? You know, we have Skype for Business. It's a great solution. Yeah, we were wrong. And, and thanks, you know, we then, you know, so we joined, we joined, if can't be them, join them. So we joined the Teams team. at Camp. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that was, that was a lot of disruption in our space at the time because it was felt like a lot of the RFCs and RFIs were basically Cisco versus Skype for Business at that point.

So like we felt or certainly I felt the brand was known, the brand was well understood, the solution was understood. Um, you fast forward, you couldn't, you couldn't, I don't think anybody could have foreseen this, but what happened in The pandemic and world events and the move to cloud and now real normal people know what Teams is like.

It's such a different scale now than it was back in the Skype for Business days. 

Shabtai: Yeah, and it was, you know, the product was not mature. I think we got on on the bandwagon somewhere in 18 19. Product was not cooked yet. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Shabtai: I think we all enjoyed, well, enjoyed is a harsh word. We did not enjoy pandemic, but pandemic really gave huge boost to all that industry, right?

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Shabtai: Working remotely and working from afar and being able to, to, um, maintain, you know, meetings and discussion and, and, and agents, contact center agents sitting, uh, remotely. So, you know, I remember the numbers, right? December 19, Zoom had like 10 million customers, and Teams was like 17 or 18 million, you know, clients.

You know, go forward six months, you know, Zoom boasted 200 or 300 million users, and Teams was always ranking up fast. So that was the evolution, and again, um, So if you ask me about AudioCodes and what's the main Business Web. Well, it's all centered about UCaaS and some CCaaS. I'll talk about the future in a minute, but it's mostly UCaaS.

And in UCaaS, we, you know, touch ourselves to Microsoft, which, you know, these days holds like 40 percent market share, et cetera. And we say, so that's a strategy. Strategy is stay strong on Microsoft Teams arena. And build yourself always upward, not to leave any chance to your competition, because they will have to build all those layers.

So it was then that we started to build, you know, the live business. Live means our managed services because at the end of the day, you know, Microsoft Teams is a pretty complex solution and for large multinational companies, it's really tough to get into it. You need to hire, you know, professionals and all around the world and it's costly, etc.

So. We are successful with that offering, you know, we can, um, we're glad that, you know, we started it back in 2020. And now this, this year we plan to end up with a business that's like 65 million, um, annual recurring revenue. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's quite a big change going from, like, there's two things you've touched on there.

One, you widened the portfolio, so you started off in SBC and now, AudioCodes have the most certified solutions. So you've got contact center, you've got recording, you've got devices, you've got voice, you've got the cloud platform. But moving from hardware and boxes to SaaS platform, how was that transition?

Shabtai: Okay, well, I can tell you that, you know, sitting in management meetings, right back in, let's say 2012, you know, we knew we're a great, I would say, voice networking company. However, we Scratch your head, and it was really tough for us to understand, you know, how we're making that transition to the cloud business.

And it was, you know, it took us several years, but I can tell you that, you know, I'm amazed, I mean, um, you know, take the live platform, I mean, at the center of our, you know, uh, success with Microsoft is a new platform that we introduced about a year ago called the live platform. So live platform is really a combination that starts from, um, you know, it starts with connectivity at the bottom with gateways and SBC.

Microsoft Teams You add on top that management of devices and users and sites, and then you do some integration, okay? So that is the basis, and it makes our deployments much faster. I mean, because otherwise, you know, it's a long, uh, you know, tedious project. So platform is that. Now the key, uh, so we call that strategy Lend and Expand, okay?

So we, we are capable of lending. in various end user accounts, true to our superiority in the connectivity business and management of users. But then we're coming up with a set of value added applications, right? You know, value added applications, just now, Think about, you know, Gen AI coming to service with Conversational AI.

So we're gradually adding more and more services to that live platform, which again will fortify and solidify our I was always, you know, dreaming of building a voice mode, right? You know, a mode, you want to build for yourself a fort. Fortress, where nobody can get near you, right? Just like, you know, big companies, great companies like, you know, Microsoft, Cisco, Check Point did, you know, they were first, they excelled in building a very strong business, and then it's very difficult to come after them.

So we're trying to do the same on the voice side. Okay. And so those are the value and applications. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And you, you touched on, uh, CCaaS and Contact Center into there. So you've now got the Voca solution. Talk to me about your thinking around kind of UC and CC starting to come together. 

Shabtai: Uh, for, for us it's a blessing.

For us. It's a blessing simply because, you know, we see it, you know, it's our glasses, you know. Probably other people would see it differently, but we see voice at the center of both, right? Because you know, your communication collaboration solution, you know, that serves your employees. may then help you, you know, you want to converge, you know, um, the contact center, right?

Until today, I think voice is like 50 percent of the traffic in contact center. So, you better have a, a, a, a, um, cohesive solution that takes care of the same technology components and serves the two. So, we very, actually, we are among, you know, the first, I think, we have, um, a great Enterprise Connect, uh, show, uh, earlier in March this year.

Microsoft And, um, so, yeah, we, we think that that convergence is, is, is happening, you know, and, and obviously companies would like to have, you know, a, a one, one, uh, combined solution. And 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's all, again, playing into this, uh, live platform play. So you can offer voice, you can offer recording, you can offer contact center all on the same kind of platform to the customer.

Shabtai: Yeah. And now, you know, we're adding, you know, conversational AI to the mix, which further, you know, Elevates. Well, you know, you know, throughout the years, if you want to be, you know, if you want to be competitive. The only way to be competitive these days because there are many, you know, other companies is to, you know, be able to penetrate and I would say conquer a little hill, but then add to it, you know, integrate it, make it bigger and bigger and bigger as you go bigger, you know, those who come with some very brilliant solution next to you still are not capable of bringing, you know, a complete solution because it takes years and hundreds of, you know, people.

So that is a lesson that we always, once we identify a thread or a product, we'll think about, okay, how you can, you know, I hate the word, you know, you know, imperialism, but how can you build an empire around that? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Shabtai: And that's the approach. 

Tom Arbuthnot: The last time we got to spoke, you were, you were really talking loads about AI and AI was definitely front of mind for you.

It seems like AudioCodes are making some big moves in AI. Meeting Insights just won UC today's best of AI award. There's lots of AI in the context of the conversation. So what was the thinking around Meeting Insights and your kind of AI strategy in general? 

Shabtai: Okay, so it all started with me sitting daily, you know, in six, seven, eight meetings a day, you know, 30 minutes long, and, you know, getting out of those meetings, you don't remember, you know, what was decided, what were the action items, okay?

And, um, so we started to develop it prior to the pandemic, um, and it was awful. Because, you know, the voice systems, the recording quality, the meeting rooms were awful. Okay, so it was really a slow start. We really struggled with all kinds of issues. Then came pandemics, which drove a lot of, you know, the collaboration solutions like Teams and Zoom.

So that made, The system is substantially better in quality, you know, it was spread, and now Microsoft, you know, with their, you know, meeting room initiative, and Zoom, you know, they all want to make your meeting room, you know, the center of, you know, the business and decisions. So, we were able to, to, to obviously evolve from that initial product.

The idea, listen, um, you know, there are two levels and basically here is something that I don't think many people paid attention to, but you know, we are not the first note taker in the industry, right? I mean, um, you know, you have a series of startups, you know, names like, uh, Otter and Alfama and others, right?

Which doing it for, and they do it, but they do it mainly more in the Zoom space, right? And then there are the big guys. You have Zoom and Microsoft who are also developing 

Tom Arbuthnot: their own first party plays. 

Shabtai: Okay, now. So, I'm building the product as follows. Okay, A, we try to excel on the meeting level. Okay, so, you know, we take care of that, you know, recording and transcription.

By the way, transcription is not an easy thing, simply because, yes, you can get 80 90 percent accuracy, but once you get to a different organization, one from Microsoft Teams. You know, the sport, uh, arena or from government or politics or health care, you know, the huge amount of, you know, concept and terms.

that a typical, you know, speech to text will not recognize. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and arguably the most important terms for them and their company, right? They are the terms that decide whether we need A or B or what they meant. 

Shabtai: Exactly. Now it's a chain, right? And the strength of the chain is, you know, related to the strength of each of, you know, the little pieces in it, right?

So, if you don't have a perfect STT, STT. Your inference, right? Your LLM solution and prompts and everything that comes afterwards will suffer 'cause it'll take different terms. So, uh, we, we pay a lot of attention, of course, to come up and, and we, um, you know, we just, um, launched a SaaS solution back in March.

Uh, fully happy. These days we have already tens of customers, you know, about 50 customers growing fast, more than 10, 15 a month. Um, But that's on the meeting level, but then, you know, myself, you know, I consider myself also, you know, not only an engineer, but a manager, and to me, you know, the fact that there's an important meeting taking place today in San Francisco with an important customer, and I, you know, the decision maker, have no direct access to Because yes, I'm told, yeah, it was a great meeting.

Yes, they are interested. At the end of the day, you know, like in any other step in the industry, you need to validate. And, you know, once you get access to that recording, and of course, all those recordings, you know, three years ago, nobody in the industry wanted to hear about it. Nowadays, they ask you, well, do you have a recording of the session?

I'd like to get it, okay? So, you get the recording, you get to understand, you know, who said what, you know, speaker recognition technology, who said what, and then you get the insight for, you know, I'm a project manager, you are a sales manager. You know, we have different perspective on, you know, what's the summary of that meeting, right?

So, we're getting all those recaps. And now we're putting them all, you know, because these days we have about, we are 1, 000 employees and about 500 use it daily. So, in that environment, we have today close to 200 meetings a day. All those meetings, Recording, Transcription, and Insights, they all go into one repository.

And now management can assign small teams that focus, let's say, on SBC and or IP phone and or recording. You know, we can identify, right? We attach tags. for every meeting, so we can pull out a bunch of meetings relating to a certain topic. And then I can work with, guess what, you know, the best, you know, chatbots in the world.

You know, could be Copilot, could be Q, could be Gemini, could be Cloud. And now, because these guys are doing, well, nice work, but not great work, right? I think everybody that's been using those chatbots know that, you know, it's accurate up to a certain limit. Why? Because they do the search on a, um, you know, huge, you know, humongous amount of data.

If you narrowed it down and take now Meeting Insight as a preprocessor or identifies those. X meetings that relate to it now, uh, the chatbot will do substantially better work. So that's how we are trying to position meeting insights. So you're 

Tom Arbuthnot: giving it like a, a better and more constrained data set.

Like here's the, here's the data set you are working on answer from this data set, but you've done all the work to make the transcription, the language specific to the customer. And all that data control is, is controlled by you and the customer, 

Shabtai: correct? Correct. Yes. So. To me, Meeting Insights now is only about Meeting Insights, but it's also about Business Insights.

And it drives, you know, better decision making, also drive, you know, knowledge management, you know, think about the day that you're one of the best employee comes and say, Hey, Tom, I'm leaving, you know, I got a better offer or going overseas, and you're losing, you know, you're losing, you know, a lot of knowledge.

However, think about having Microsoft Teams. The company recording this guy and everybody's meeting for the past so many years now you bring a new guy, you know? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Really? Yeah. Imagine if you could ask the history of a project, like, why did we go this way? What did we do? Theoretically, all that knowledge could be captured in conversation.

Shabtai: Now you're starting to scratch, you know, the importance of, you know, the prompts industry, right? Mm-Hmm. , because that's, at the end of the day, you know, you know, you, you interview me and, and you will, as I know that, you know. The questions are the more important thing of an, of anything. So if you ask the right questions in a good way because prompts get to be sometimes very accurate and detailed, then you get great answers.

So, Meeting Insights just started a huge, huge, you know, journey into the future. And, um, and, um, and we, I think, you know, we're talking to customers, you know, every customer brings up, you know, a new angle of sight. So, it's really exciting. It's really exciting, and I think it's got a great future, so. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's great to understand, and that's your thinking about sustained differentiation, because as you said, Microsoft Zoom can do it first party, Microsoft can do it first party, but the things you can do to help the end customer in a particular way, like everything at the moment in the first party solutions is very personal or that group based, whereas because you're controlling the data, you can let, again, subject to the customer wanting to, let's span All the calls in this department or all the contacts and scenarios or all the engineering meetings, you can go bigger on your data sets.

Shabtai: Absolutely. You know, it's like, you know, the saying, nine ways to skin a cat. So a thousand ways to skin a million. And, um, yeah, it's great. And then, you know, uh, by now I'm stepping one step further. Okay, because if you ask me, okay, where is the future of the company? So, you know, on one end, you know, we put our bets on, you know, um, on the live, the live business and the live platform for, for the UCaaS and Microsoft Teams business on one end.

But then, you know, there's a huge opportunity to starting up right now in the conversational AI business. Now here, By the way, there are two, two, two ways in which we go to market. Okay. One, which is very simple, the traditional, right? We, um, you know, Gidi, um, is great and is partnering a lot great in, you know, coming up with Voca CAC, which is a great, you know, a first solution for Microsoft Teams.

So that's the first leading, you know, SaaS application. Uh, we have, uh, SmartTAP, which is a very nice, you know, either compliance or interaction recording solution. that also is a great SaaS application, and then Meeting Insights. So on one end, we will try to come up with applications that each target a different need, but then they are fully, um, I would say close.

or would evolve, but still it's, it's, it's all surrounding. But what happens now, if you go and we worked here with the, uh, Israeli, uh, Red Cross organization. So their biggest issue is they're getting, you know, minutes of calls every year, you know, hundreds of calls an hour, and they need to resolve, you know, A, what's happening and B, you know, they need to resolve the most important thing, which is, where do I send the ambulance?

Because if you have two names of cities, which are spread a hundred kilometers far from the other one, okay, and you know, uh, You know, uh, uh, names in, in, in, in the U. K. doesn't count, but there's a very close, yeah, you can think about yourself for Yorkshire and Berkshire, and, you know, just think about that.

It would be a disaster if you just sent the ambulance to the wrong address, right? So, To make that solution work, we started with some real bad, noisy cell phones, so the accuracy rate of the SCT was like 40%. So we had to connect to telephony, we had to build a good networking solution because it went into a contact center.

We had to attach recording to it, we had to put some management solution. control of the devices, way to do transcription. Now we build, you know, uh, some, some inference solution on top of that, using LLM technology. Think about how many organizations in this world, you know, that are in possession of all those diverse set of, Technologies and Tools.

We're lucky that we have that 30 years behind us, that we've developed all that, you know, telephony 

Tom Arbuthnot: and 

Shabtai: networking, that now we can throw into the game, you know, conversational AI, and now you come up with a perfect recipe. So, We put huge effort in developing, you know, um, um, not only SaaS solution, but also what I would call custom SaaS or custom projects for big companies because everybody needs to, you know, customize it for his, you know, um, uh, telephony network or CRM or anything like that.

Tom Arbuthnot: You've got both angles. You've got, you can build end user AI products like Meeting Insights. You can infuse AI into things like Voca and Contact Center in your products, but you can also leverage that technology for. larger bespoke solutions for customers. 

Shabtai: Right, right. So that's, you know, that's why, you know, you hear me excited in this call, because, you know, yeah, we did a lot, but there's great things to do, you know, going forward.

So on one end, it's Microsoft Teams and live business, contact center business, and then the conversational AI, which is completely new venue for us. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Shabtai, thanks so much for taking the time to talk us through the Amazing journey in the product portfolio, and I'm really excited as well about AI and what our space is going to look like in the next few years.

Shabtai: Well, thank you, Tom. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today. And obviously, you know, let's stay in touch and let's meet every so many months and we can talk about the new things we see around. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I'd love to do that. Yeah, and I appreciate your support of everything we've been doing over the years and AudioCodes' support.

So thanks for that. 

Shabtai: Glad to do that.